Grace Fellowship Church - Pre-Conference Session 1

The following recording is from our Grace Fellowship Church Conference 2025. Please visit us at graceedmonton .ca to learn more about us. You can also find us on Instagram, Grace Church, Y-E-G, all one word, or on Facebook.

You can also find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please enjoy the following recording.

Good morning.

It's a joy to see your faces, some for the further times and some of you for the first time. It's a joy to be back in Edmonton and just to meet new family we're going to live with forever. And, you know, Christians are the only people that have a true literal family everywhere in the world.

You can find believers who love the Lord Jesus Christ, every tribe, tongue, nation of the earth, and that's advancing more. So thank you for having us, uh, Shane and Sam. Thank you for the invitation to come and participate in this conference.

I would ask your prayers for my voice and my throat. The Lord will help me, but I would appreciate prayer very much for that. I won't use it in the pulpit. I have one down there. Thank you, brother. So the theme of this conference in essence is endurance for the long haul, enduring, persevering in ministry through discouragements, through whatever comes.

But all that obviously doesn't just apply to the Christian ministry. It applies equally to the Christian life, right? Jesus said it's the one who endures to the end who's going to prove to be truly saved.

So perseverance is not an option, is it? And as John Newton said, through many dangers, toils, and snares we have already come. And so, as A .W. Tozer said, the Christian, when they're born again, they're born into a hostile world behind enemy lines.

And this world is not a playground, it's a battleground. So no theme really is more fitting and pertinent to living the Christian life in a post-Christian world, in a very secular society like Canada.

And increasingly, your sister to the south is chasing you for that liberalism. In this past couple of years, you've had it more difficult in a lot of ways than America has, but God is equipping his church.

He's sifting out the goats. Since COVID really, the sheep and the goats become more obvious who's real and who isn't and who doesn't continue to persevere. But God is building his church. But he wants to equip all of his children, church leaders and pastors and elders and deacons and believers alike with endurance.

That right to the last moment of your breath and the beating of your heart, you're running after Christ. So I want to speak this morning in this first session from 2 Timothy chapter 2 on the topic or the title, Endurance for a Lifetime of Ministry.

Now, if you're not a minister or you don't serve in any leadership capacity, you can change your title to Endurance for a Lifetime of Living for Christ. It all is the same, whether you're an elder pastor or a new believer.

Endurance to the end, endurance for a lifetime is the goal. And so 2 Timothy chapter 2, we'll read verses 1 through 4. Paul's words to his beloved son in the faith, Timothy, he says, you, therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

And the things that you have heard from me, among many witnesses, these things you commit to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. Thou, therefore, endure hardness or endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

No one that woreth or goes to battle entangles himself with the affairs of this life in order that he may please him who has chosen him to be a good soldier. So every Christian, man, woman, boy or girl, every true Christian is called to fight the good fight, to wage a good warfare, to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

God desires many things. I mean, I think of the word worship. I was listening recently to Alistair Begg on about worship, and it just struck me the God-centeredness of what we must have in worship. And, you know, with the last, really the last 40 years in the professing Christian world, worship has been a big buzzword.

The charismatic movement, the Jesus movement in the United States in the 1970s, and then wonderful songs were birthed often. But false views about worship emerged, didn't they? What it is, what it is, what it ought to look like, what it ought to and all that.

But the fact is, God is looking for true worshippers, true worshippers who worship in spirit and truth. He is looking for true disciples who follow their master right in the straight and narrow and don't get off the path, don't get distracted by new trends and new movements and men who can speak heresy very persuasively and beautifully.

The Lord wants disciples on the straight and narrow. He wants all of us to be good soldiers of Jesus Christ and to take heed, as Moses said over and over again, to take heed to the words of Jehovah, to take heed to the words of the God of Israel, which Jesus called God's words.

He said every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Well, then Jesus quoted Deuteronomy three times. And so the Bible is the mouth of God. And the Holy Spirit is the one that speaks it through his church and through his servants.

So we are to be among those who desire to stay focused, to be watchful in all things, but also have who have a fresh rising faith like Caleb, who at 85 said, said, I want to kill me a moose. Let's go.

Now that's Texan for I want to I want that mountain. Caleb at 85. He is conquering new realms. He's going after the the promises of God. But God had promised him 40 or 40 or years early the land. Right.

And at 85 here he is saying, give me that mountain. Every Christian ought to be that way in their heart toward the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, I want higher ground. I want to be treading on the upward way.

New heights I'm gaining every day. So that's the kind of worshipers that God wants. He wants true Christians who are all out, sold out in reality, not just in word only, but indeed in truth, sold out completely radically to serve the king of kings.

Now, if that's in any of our hearts, the Bible says that we must through much tribulation. Enter the kingdom, possess the kingdom. So along with being a worshiper and a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ and a servant of God, if that's your badge.

Your badge was baptism when you were baptized in a sense outwardly to the world and you're a follower of Christ. Well, with that package of salvation comes suffering. It comes right with it. Paul said to the Philippians in chapter one, under you it has been given not only to believe on Christ, but to also what?

Suffer for his sake. So with salvation comes forgiveness of sins and union with Christ and the warning of the reality of suffering will also be given to us. This is a very big truth in the Bible. Endurance.

Marching through everything you have to face and you come out on the other end of it more like Christ. You become out better. You come out better than those who don't come out and they're bitter. Everything in life often that we experience brings suffering and it's a massive truth addressed in the New Testament.

And I believe in our day nothing is more important for Christians in general or for those in gospel ministry, particularly to realize that we have a mission to fulfill, but we have an enemy who has set on disqualifying every one of us from finishing our mission to cause you to be a castaway, a reprobate, to walk away from the faith as the book of Hebrews so strongly warns against.

Now it is hardly possible to overstate the importance of this, that every believer is responsible for God to endure all things and to persevere through all things, not alone, but you have to go through it yourself.

No one can do it for you, whatever it is that you are experiencing. We have an adversary that is busy at every stage of our life's work, seeking to destroy and discourage every Christian. Have you read the Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan?

That's what it's all about. It's an astounding picture of the Christian journey from leaving the city of destruction in your lost condition, and you set out often without support of family, but actually having opposition of family when you come to Christ and you're walking alone, and your face is set toward Zion, but you have to keep going.

There's no turning back. And so, statistics tell us today that many begin well, but don't always finish well. In fact, they often don't finish at all. We've heard of famous people, and we've heard of friends in our own circles that sadly fall away.

So, to endure to the end well, we must do what the Apostle Paul said, and by way of introduction, I just want us to realize that a personal closer study of the topic of suffering and hardship and temptation and battling error or heresy and staying close to your church and availing yourself of every means of grace, prayer, and the Word of God, and the ministry of the church, and private devotions, and true fellowship, every one of those are means to keep us pressing on.

And so, I want to address in my two sessions today this theme of endurance and finishing well in the form of two historical biographies. The first would take us back to the 18th century of the colonies of pre-America.

There were 13 colonies before America became a nation toward the end of the 18th century, 13 British colonies that were under the rule of the King of Britain, strong rule. Now, one of those colonies was Connecticut.

It's north of New York City, obviously, and in the 18th century in Connecticut, near New Haven, there was a small town called Haddam, Connecticut, and there was a family who owned a farm, and the last name of the family was the Brainerds.

And by this time, they had been there several generations, having immigrated over. The Brainerds had nine children, and the sixth and seventh of them were brothers, David Brainerd. Anybody ever heard of David Brainerd?

Most Christians who've read or listened over the years, they're aware of David Brainerd, but his younger brother by two years was John Brainerd. So, we're going to see from their example this morning, the Brainerd brothers, of what it looks like to endure through a lot, extreme hardship, and when they came to the time of their death, they really had no regrets.

Now, they weren't perfect men, and they would have had personal regrets, but when you look at the record, the record was exemplary and very, very inspiring. The indomitable Brainerd brothers and their 18th century mission to the North American Indian tribes.

Now, those tribes don't exist anymore. They dispersed. The colonial government gave them land, took it away, gave them new land. They had moved, took it away again, and finally, the Indian tribes dispersed into Canada, into the northern states of Michigan, and the Dakotas, and then other places.

But during the 18th century, the North American Indian tribes were all over the eastern coast area from Long Island, New York City, into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other areas as well. So, my message this morning basically has three brief points.

Hopefully, the Brainerd story, number one, and I think, Shane, some of the books will be here maybe today. The story is in the book by Reformation Heritage, and so I'll be later, but I'll be reading a few excerpts that hopefully will be brief and edifying.

So, the Brainerd story, their hardships, and their endurance. Very simple points. The story of what happened, who they were, their hardships, some of them that they went through, and their endurance all the way to the end, because these two brothers are examples for us today.

Think about this. If all of Hebrews 11, and the names that are mentioned, and those not mentioned by name, are they not still examples for us because we see a record of what they did? Yes. Well, those in church history we read about, including David Brainerd, they are examples to us today, even though it's over 300 years later, because their choices to obey Christ, their endurance through hardship, their commitment to missions, their living for him daily, shines brightly to us over the pages of history.

So, the years. What years are we talking about? 18th century. David Brainerd was 21 years old in the year 1739. So, from 1739 to the death of John Brainerd in 1781, that's four decades, the Brainerd brothers, their lives and ministry was occurring.

So, let's just think about the story. David Brainerd enters Yale College. There were no universities yet. There was Harvard College, there was Yale College, and those were really the first two universities or colleges that were going to become universities.

So, David enters Yale in 1739, just two months after his conversion to Christ. He had always wanted to be a minister in the Presbyterian church, even before he was converted. He struggled deeply in those couple of years prior to his conversion to gain assurance.

He didn't know how to believe. He didn't know if God had accepted him. He didn't know if he understood things enough and he doubted and he struggled. Well, two months before he's on his way to Yale, God savingly meets with David Brainerd and his heart suddenly has great joy and a sense of the forgiveness of his sins and assurance comes.

And with the freshness of that and the glowing joy of that, he rides 40 miles to New Haven to Yale College to start his first year of college. We would call that the freshman year. Is that the Canadian term too?

First year of college, freshman year of college for Americans. So, he enters Yale as a freshman, but he begins to excel. And by the time he's a junior, that was our third year of college, he is a class president of the largest class that Yale had had up to this point.

And he's a leader, but he also had heard George Whitefield preach and he hadn't met Jonathan Edwards yet, but a revival was occurring in those colonies in different places. Whitefield had come over, it was the first great awakening, 1735 is pretty much the year it begins.

And God is moving across the colonies and among students at Harvard and Yale. And so, David Brainerd has embraced this great fervent faith of biblical Christianity. And he comes with a fire in his heart to Yale and in his junior year, he experiences something that changed his life and his future forever.

And because of that, it changed the future of a lot of other things. It was a midweek day and the students would have to come to a chapel service. And one of the undergraduate lecturers, they called them tutors in the 18th century, was leading in a prayer.

And so, David Brainerd goes back to his room with a friend and they're in the privacy of the room, the door standing open, and David Brainerd says, you know, I don't think Mr. Hislop has any more grace than this chair I'm sitting on.

Well, that may have been true because there were a lot of liberals, there were a lot of unconverted people in ministry. It was an admirable choice of profession in the 18th century. To be a lawyer, to be a landowner, and to be a minister was a role of honor.

It was admirable. So, there were many that were unregenerate. And this tutor, David Brainerd observes and makes this statement, I don't think he has any more grace than this chair I'm sitting on. Someone's walking by the room and they hear two young men criticizing the tutor by name and they go and report him.

Well, there were so many students that were for the revival that, and there were so many administration that were against the revival, that the administration had made a recent policy that if any students are heard criticizing any professors or tutors, that they would be disciplined.

So, Brainerd gets reported, they find out who it is, they call him in, and he apologizes immediately. He owns his failure, he apologizes to the tutor personally, he apologizes to the group of administrators, and then they say, all right, well, you have to stand before the whole student body and all of the Yale College family, and you have to make a public apology with public repentance for this.

Well, David Brainerd's conscience said, this doesn't seem right. And so, when he wouldn't do it, Jonathan Edwards didn't think he should do it. He was expelled suddenly, and he was not able to graduate.

So, picture him riding on his horse the 40 miles to go back to the farm, and he's the first Brainerd in several generations that had not been to Yale and graduated, he's out. Now, his chances of being a pastor in the colonies is gone, because in those days, you could only be a pastor or minister of a church if you were a graduate of a European university or Harvard or Yale.

His hopes are dashed of being a minister. He didn't want to be a farmer. He knew not what to do, and he was distraught. And behind the scenes, God was working to redirect his life to the work that he was called by God to do.

And that was, he was given an invitation to go to the Indians in Long Island, New York. Now, the mission agency sending, they had an office in New York, but it was the Scottish, it was the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

They were doing missions in the colonies. And so, David Brainerd was recommended to them after his expulsion, this man could go. And so, David Brainerd goes. He leaves, and as a 24-year-old in the fall of 1742, David Brainerd finds himself riding his horse alone.

He's going alone, a long ride from Connecticut to Long Island in those days, to begin what might become the shortest but the most famous missionary career in all of Christian history, because it became famous because of what happened.

And if Jonathan Edwards had not taken the diary and journal of David Brainerd and published it, no one today would have ever heard of David Brainerd, were it not for Jonathan Edwards. So, David, at the age of 24, begins three years only of Christian ministry.

He was among the Indians only for three years, from 1743 to 1746. And then a year later, at age 28, he died in the home of Jonathan Edwards. So, what did David Brainerd do? Well, as a young white man in a culture where the Indian tribes didn't trust white men, because the white traders had cheated them, and the white politicians had cheated them, this young white man of 24 was going to ride into an Indian tribe at the end of Long Island, uninvited, unknown, a stranger.

And these Indians would have had no clue why he was there and establish his first Indian mission on Long Island. He was there 1743 to 1744. It was brief. The second one in 1744 through 45 was in Pennsylvania.

I'm not sure how far it was from Philadelphia, but it was in the wilderness. It was all a wilderness in that time. And he was there a year from 1744 to 1745. The third mission, he had heard about a group of Indians at Cross Weekson, New Jersey, which is halfway between Princeton and Philadelphia.

And he said, I'm going to go there, because he was under authority, and he had been commissioned to find Indian tribes where the gospel can be planted. And he was a pioneer, an apostolic pioneer evangelist as a missionary.

But it was only at the third mission at Cross Weekson, New Jersey, where David saw really any blessing in his work. But there, in that third Indian mission, there was significant blessing, because from the very beginning of his preaching, these are Indians that worship their ancestors and worship demons, have never heard of the white man's God, have never seen a Bible.

They know nothing, absolutely nothing. And Brainerd begins to preach, and from the first week, they're open and they're listening and they're being struck. He has obviously a translator who knows enough English to translate.

And I think David kept that translator with him for the three years from location to location. But as he's speaking just the gospel, but it was a true, pure, solid biblical gospel. It was a doctrinal gospel.

David Brainerd and his brother John, they could read their Old Testament in Hebrew and their New Testament in Greek. They knew theology. They knew Puritan theology. But they were missionaries, and they were evangelists, and they were given utterance by God in being able to make the gospel clear at the most elementary level through a translator to these, what was truly in that day, savage Indian tribes.

So that first week, the Spirit of God begins, apart from any other thing of preaching, they didn't sing. As he began to speak, Indians all over the area on the ground began to weep, and they began to cry out.

They were under deep conviction. It was as if a rainstorm had come and settled, and it started raining. That's why the Bible calls this an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. My Spirit will be poured out on all flesh.

And so God began to save people, right on earth, old hardened men, young girls, and all ages in between. There was no human explanation of who was under conviction. The whole tribe was coming under conviction, and this went for a week to two weeks, a month, two months, three months.

And the movement continued in mighty, amazing power, and the entire tribe virtually was converted in those months and became a biblical church with membership, with discipline, with true biblical worship, and with accountability to one another, and with real love for one another.

It was an astounding work, and you can read about it in Rayner's journal, which I really would encourage you to do that. Well, listen to what he says, because this was a time that David was not full of faith, or encouraged, or feeling good.

It was at a time he was the most discouraged and weary that he had been in all three years. And he wrote this in his journal, quote, I do not know that my hope for the conversion of the Indians was at ever such a low point as then, when I came here among these Indians and saw God begin to work.

His hope was at the lowest point ever that he would even see Indians saved. He was sick. He was already dying of the tuberculosis that would take his life 12 months later. He was lonely. He was tired.

He was depressed. He was often in deep depression. It was a chronic, hereditary thing for David Brainerd. And that's when God came. When the human situation and circumstances were at their lowest, God came and did an amazing historic revival in our nation.

One of the greatest pure works of the Holy Spirit that the early colonies ever saw. Well, he didn't realize that he only had about a year left to live. But in fact, let me read you an excerpt of what he was feeling at the moment.

Well, this is a quote about the movement. The Spirit of God began to open and change the hearts of both adults and children instantly, giving them clear understanding of the gospel and creating genuine receptivity to the truth, a deep spirit of repentance and love for the Messiah and his future return swept through the whole tribe.

The idolatrous Indians of New Jersey had no previous knowledge whatsoever of Christianity other than the general revelation that witnessed to their conscience about the reality of a creator. Some historians have inferred that the movement of the Holy Spirit there in the Brainerd Indians was the greatest display, one of the greatest displays of divine power in all of church history since the day of Pentecost.

As one recorded it in simple terms, when David Brainerd first explained to the Indians what sin was and how Jesus Christ came into the world and died to save them from everlasting punishment, it affected them so much to hear that Christ suffered to save such wicked Indians as they were that they threw themselves on the ground and sobbed aloud.

That is what happened. So a church is birthed and his younger brother John had graduated from Yale and he was coming out to visit periodically. He wasn't going, he wanted to pastor a church, but he came to visit David at some of David's lowest times and David realizes at a certain point he's dying.

He knew it and he knew he had to leave. So David leaves and John Brainerd comes to replace David. John is the forgotten Brainerd. He was a graduate of Yale College, but David recommended John to the mission agency to replace him, not just because he was a brother, but because he was qualified.

He had the same maturity and godliness as David, but he was more level in his life. David was up and down with his depression. David was flourished often times with zeal and passion and praying for hours in the snow, but John was more on an even keel.

While David was an evangelist, John had pastoral skills, so God had purpose in David leaving who had been the one who reaped the harvest. He's bringing in John to pastor this Indian church and to take the work over.

And so John comes two years younger and he stays 10 times longer among the Indians than David did. David had been three years among them in various locations. John stays 35 years until the end of his life at 61 years old.

He dies in 1781, but John labors for over three decades as a missionary to the Indians, as a church planter, and as a pastor and an educator. John Brainerd was instrumental in establishing the first Indian school in all of the colonies.

And that school was moved and it became later Dartmouth University. So he had a great influence in various ways on the future development of the nation. He became a trustee for 25 years at the newfound college, Princeton College.

How did Princeton start? Well, when David Brainerd was expelled, Jonathan Edwards and other Yale graduates were so offended at what the administration did toward David unjustly that they came together and they said, we need a new college.

And they started one and it became Princeton. So Princeton is a direct result of David Brainerd's new direction. God was at work in various ways. But John, he rides to the Indians while David is dying at Jonathan Edwards' home.

And no one had more reasons to shrink away from going alone to replace his legendary brother. John could have easily declined and he could have compared himself to David, which he did once in a while.

He could have thought, I don't have the endurance that my brother has. I can't do this. Fears, carnal counsel to not go, he would have heard. But he chose to go. And so he, like David, rides his horse to the final location with the Indian church in Bethel, Maryland.

And in going to the among them, he didn't know any language. They knew David or they knew John and respected him. But so there was not as much ice to break or ground to break as David had. But there were many, many problems.

A plague, the first six months swept through the Indian tribe and 160 of the Indians died day after day. And it was on John to bury them, to comfort their families. It was a very, very difficult time.

John's ministry officially begins in April of 1747, six months before David will die. And what did John do? He pastored Indian congregations. He established schools. He planted churches wherever could.

Now, David, if you read the journal of David Brainerd, David would take a ride for two or three weeks or longer on his horse into wilderness areas, looking for villages, looking for settlers, and he would go take the gospel.

Some many times to Indians, many times to white settlers. John continued the same thing. He took long trips, sleeping by streams at night on a bearskin when wolves would be howling all around and far away from any towns whatsoever.

They're riding on the paths that have been charted in the primitive maps they had to get to places known and places perhaps unknown. John continued this pioneer work of evangelism, but he planted churches.

He planted a number of churches wherever he could find converts. Now, evangelism to the Indians was a very difficult thing. You're dealing with people who know nothing, who don't understand, don't even believe in the white man's God, aren't open to the white man's religious book because the white settlers had tried to poison them from it.

It was a very difficult thing, and it took a lot of patience just to begin to catechize them one-on-one, families in their teepees with smoke there. It affected David immensely, but he endured it. He had to put up with it.

Another excerpt about the evangelism among the Indians, one author summarized it this way of the difficulties. One of the obstacles in reaching the Indians with the gospel was their negative feeling toward white men who call themselves Christians.

One Indian leader complained to David Brainerd that it was the Christians who taught the Indians to drink and provide them with alcohol. Well, not real Christians, but they professed to be Christians, white settlers.

It was the Christians who enslaved the Indians and forced them to fight the white man's battles against the French and Spanish, and it was the Christians who pretended to be their friends and then would steal their lands.

So just the favor they needed from God to cause the Indians to be open to them, to trust them at all, was a huge thing, and everywhere David and John went, God gave supernatural favor. Because the Indians saw something different.

They saw men who didn't seem to be a threat, who were honest, who were humble, who seemed to have character, and the more the Indian tribes knew David and John's life, the more they trusted them. Well, one time there was a group of Indians had asked David if they could answer, ask a lot of questions.

So this may have been the first Q &A in American Christianity, I don't know, but this is quite striking. Listen to what the honest and good questions the Indians had, and think of how you would answer these questions.

First question, why didn't God kill the devil that made all men bad, if he has all power? Well, you answer that one for a five-year-old and see how far you get. What an amazing question. Next question, they asked Brainerd, why did God not give all men good hearts?

How can I bring my heart to love prayer? How long was Adam good before he sinned? Does the devil dwell in us just as we dwell in a wigwam? When a soul goes to heaven or hell, what does it say when it gets there?

See, these childlike questions of a new heart that knows nothing, it's a blank slate, you see. Why does God punish men in hell forever? Why must we love our enemies, and how can we do it? Will a good man keep sinning sometimes?

The Indians responded eagerly, asking questions for hours. The first question for some was this, how may we come to know Jesus Christ? An Indian once asked former missionary John Elliott in the colonies, why has no white man ever told us this before?

Why did you wait to tell us? Elliott could only answer, I'm sorry. So John is engaged in this catechizing work on the foundation that David Brainerd has laid. But the main thing I want to just emphasize is I began to move toward closing these thoughts.

The suffering the Brainerds went through is remarkable, but part of it was because of the 18th century. Life was so much harder. People died so much earlier. But what the Brainerds did and how they suffered from the time David arrived among the Indians in that first year, every week or every month, sometimes days strung together back to back, it was very hard and very, very difficult.

Deep discouragements. David sometime would land with a fever two days in his private place where he would sleep. And he was too sick. Tuberculosis was working deeply and he was vomiting up blood. He was in bad fevers.

He sometimes would believe that he was dying. And so extreme difficulties in every way. And, excuse me, another excerpt or two, quote, when the Brainerd mission began, suffering was a great reality for both David and John.

During his many travels, John suffered at the hands of horse thieves and he'd have to walk days to get home. He suffered and endured through exposure to the elements and had many disappointments and trials in the past.

He, like David, also battled through some spiritual depression and John, the death of his first wife and two children before he remarried. David never married. John married twice. Yet they persevered through it all and they loved the Indians and they remained faithful, both David and John.

By this time, David, at the end of his life, was a legend. And he had offers to come back to the comforts of Connecticut and Boston and he declined them. John had the same thing. They would not be deterred from their God-called mission to do the ministry God had put before them, no matter how hard it got.

So, secular historians have said, and the governors of the colonies within 100 years of the Brainerd's Indian mission work, secular historians and colonial governors said, the Brainerd brothers, David and John, and the Brainerd Indian mission did more for Native Americans than anyone ever did in all of early American history.

So, that's a very, very brief sketch. I commend you reading. If you've never read David's journal, get it and read it. It's hard reading at points, but it's amazing. And then this is the only book that exists that tells the story together, David and John's work together and how John's life was used of God in the same way.

So, well, let's apply this for just a few minutes here. Fast forward 280 years. How do we endure hardship in living the Christian life and in Christian ministry? How do we persevere? If you're a young person and you're a new Christian starting out, or you're a young man or a young couple, and you feel the excitement of feeling like God is calling you to future ministry and you want to serve Christ, how do we endure for the first year and five years and 10 and 20 and 40 and 50?

How do we keep going through a very dark world? How do we run well to the end and not give up? How do we? Can we figure it out? Can we mount up the resources where we got it all? We know what we need to know and we've got it figured out.

We've got a plan in place where we won't mess up. Can we pull this off? The answer is no. How do we persevere to the end so that our journey ends well and on our deathbed we can say, Father, as imperfect as I was, you know my heart was serving you right to the end and I stayed committed to the cause and to the King.

And you can die with joy. How do you get there? Well, Paul tells us in some very specific, simple ways. He warns about one thing over and over again with the word which Jesus used to beware, beware. If the Christian walks in watchfulness and walks in daily obedience to the commands of Christ and the daily obedience to the exhortations in the New Testament, if we give real heed to those seriously, we will finish well.